> I see this in a lot of historical Wikipedia articles now. I'm not sure what to think of it. It feels like a modern tag added to articles that feels somewhat out of place.
> My understanding that at the time, and most of history war, what we think of as war crimes were a standard practice of war.
Nah. They werent - Romans were famous for being particularly brutal even in their time. Which was one of the reasons for their easier conquest against weaker targets. Much better to become a Roman province or client state than get yourself conquered a few years later, half of your population enslaved and exported and the other half sent to work in the local mines.
Solely what Julius Caesar did in Gaul would give shivers to even his contemporaries. That's why he so slyly wrote the history of his own Gallic conquest himself - to shape the narrative.
There were other societies in history that employed brutal 'conqueror's rights' formats, like Assyrians, and after Assyrians this became kind of standard practice in Near East. But even Assyrians were not as brutal as Romans, who even discarded their unwanted babies into a trash pile outside their cities.
> It seems strange to me to tag the end of an article about a large scale war and saying "hey this one group committed war crimes" and just leave it at that if you're not talking about specific events.
For any other society or period, you might need to do that. But the atrocious behavior in Roman practices was so widespread that there would be no end to it if you started detailing the acts individually. Granted, what you described is something that is obvious to students of history, but its not so obvious to the general public.